I don’t know about you, but I’m not always at my best these days. Last night, I was relaxing in bed after tucking the kids in. About 15 minutes later, our son came into the bedroom and started to crawl into our bed. I pointed to his room and sternly shook my head. I was tired, and we were not going to be extending bedtime. He looked crestfallen. I felt bad, and then worse when it became clear that he was just coming in to give us a little craft he’d made out of perler beads earlier that day. Sometimes I feel like I’m made out of clay -- emotionally stodgy and clumpy.
Which brings me to the huge stucco Buddha statue in northern Thailand. It’s been around for several hundred years, first in Siam before it was Thailand, then surviving Burmese raids and the religious relic hunters that came with them, and finally transported among various temples until it found its current home north of Bangkok. About sixty years ago, while it was enduring one of its various moves, it was accidentally dropped by a crane. The plaster cracked, and a monk discovered that inside the stucco was gold. A lot of gold. The whole statue, in fact, was made of gold. Five and a half tons of gold worth over $200 million. Most people who study such things think that the Buddha was covered at one point to disguise it from Burmese raiders.
It may be hard to remember this after nearly a year of living in uncertainty, fear, and anxiety, but inside all of us -- hopefully not too far beneath the surface -- is the person we want to be. It’s still there. Perhaps, in the past year, the trauma and frustration and disappointment of world events has layered some edginess over our inner calm, or maybe there’s some anger covering our natural joy. Maybe it’s COVID, or systemic racism, or any of the other calamities that we’re currently enduring.
Combine that with the fact that it’s just hard for many of us to acknowledge that we’re beautiful, and it’s no surprise that we’re stuck in the stucco. In his book The Wise Heart, Jack Kornfield talks about the inner nobility of all beings. What if we could bring that nobility to the world more often? What if we could chip through the fear that makes us react (instead of respond), the insecurity that makes us afraid or arrogant, the sadness that makes us angry?
It reminds me of the Marianne Williamson quote: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?” Williamson is writing in the Christian tradition. Kornfield is writing in the Buddhist tradition. The point, however, transcends religion. You might say it’s humanist.
And the results are real. Suffering -- the kind we feel ourselves, and the kind we impose on others when we point to their room and shake our heads -- is just amplified when we don’t recognize its source, and can’t see the light underneath. And that’s where mindfulness comes in. If we can sit with our thoughts and feelings, and investigate them, slow them down, then we can start to unravel the stucco and see the gold glinting through.
Let’s try a practice now.
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